Chapter 9: Starting Out in Victoria

I once again find myself in temporary housing. A week later, I am on a plane to Victoria to live with my Grandparents. In my first life, I didn’t get to know them very well. My parents always made them out to have an unjust hatred for my father. Given how much of an asshole my father was, I’m not so sure the hatred was unjust. In my first life, Grandma died due to health problems caused by smoking. It wasn’t cancer. That would have been better than what she suffered. Her lungs just slowly failed. It was a slow and painful death that took years.

I also remember Grandpa dying. I was in my late 30s when he died of old age. He was in and out of the hospital. All but one of his children moved over a thousand miles away. Sam, my only uncle in town, was the baby and lived a sheltered life. He had no way of coping when Grandpa’s health deteriorated. I was always the one that was sitting in the hospital holding Grandpa’s hand every time he had a close call, and everybody thought he was dying. That was my only real experience with the man. Thankfully, when he did die, it was expected, and there was enough time for all his children to come and say goodby before he passed on.

Given the recent events in my life, my aunt’s arrest made national news. I was in Victoria in time for Christmas. As soon as I got to my grandparent’s place, I phoned Shelly and let her know I was safe. She was relieved but sad to lose me. She promised to write, but that only lasts a couple letters.

Thankfully my Grandparents are a bit naive and very trusting. They give me far more freedom than you should give a 14-year-old. Rachel makes contact with me on Christmas Eve. The day after Boxing Day, we are talking to a patent lawyer. Then we get a business license. We start a company, giving her 30% ownership and me the other 70%. I need a parental signature and trick my Uncle Sam into signing the papers.

There are three patents I file that day. The first, I plan on giving to the university. It is for a lithium-ion battery. Lithium-ion batteries were invented in the 1970s. The problem with them is they aren’t efficient, and they are non-rechargeable. By 1988 they are rechargeable, but they only hold a small charge, and the battery only lasts a few months before it can’t hold a charge. They are barely good enough for Compaq to sell the first laptop. The computer is OK, but the battery sucks. It can only power the computer for a few minutes. You have to keep the computer plugged in at all times.

The version of the lithium-ion battery I am patenting lasts a minimum of 2 years, and instead of powering a laptop for a few minutes, it can power one for a couple hours. It isn’t the most advanced version of the battery that I know how to build. I am saving that to patent later. There is no need to give the school more than I have to. This version has a problem with combusting spontaneously.

The two patents I am going to use to make money are simple pieces of electronics. Both will be patented in 3 to 6 months from now, so I don’t see it as having too big of an impact on the timeline. Not that I have been too careful to preserve time. The patents are for the USB drive and the MP3 player. By New Year, the patents are filed under our company’s name. We have patent-pending numbers and send letters, express, to Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, IBM and Apple. It is just a matter of waiting, then negotiating before buckets of money will pour in. By 2018 275 million iPods had been sold. If I played my cards right, that would be $550 million in our pockets from Apple’s MP3 player alone. I am lining us up to become billionaires.

There is a lot that happens between Christmas and New year. I am officially the ward of my grandparents but move in with my Uncle Sam, who just got a divorce. The two households might as well be one for all the time they spent together. Living with Sam has many advantages. It is an old house on Latoria rd. The yard is huge. There is a three-bay seven-car garage on top of the hill and a one-car garage with an attached shop down by the house. I am pleased when I find out it will be just Sam and me living there. He and Grandpa rebuild antique cars as a hobby. I am looking forward to helping them with some of their projects. I also have plans of my own for the shops.

Grandma is the real brains of the family. She made a lot of money in the stock market. Unfortunately, most of that was lost just after she died. The Americans caused a world recession, and many people lost their shirts in the market crash.

Boxing Day, when Grandma gets back from shopping, I sit her down.

“Grandma, something needs to be done about my schooling.”

“Don’t worry about it. We have you taken care of. You will start school on your birthday when school starts up in January.”

We are sitting at the kitchen table. Grandma always keeps a pad of paper and pencil on the table because of how often they play cards here. I grab the pad and pencil and start writing.

“That isn’t what I mean. If I were to take a placement test, I would ace it and not have to go to school.”

When I finish writing, I give her the pad. She looks at it a little confused.

“What is this?”

“The equations for cold fusion.”

She isn’t a fool. She knows what cold fusion would mean for the world, nuclear power without radioactive waste and cheap, clean energy. Unfortunately, it is a pipe dream and is proven impossible. There are errors in the equation. That won’t be found out for almost 50 years.

“Let me make some phone calls. We will see what we can do to get you started in university. Don’t think this gets you out of High School, young man. We still have to think of your social development. Lord only knows the problems you already have from the things your parents and Child Services put you through.”

I know I can trust her to take care of it. From what little I know of her from my first life, she was the one that took care of the family, and for the first time, I am feeling like part of a family.

I let her know my greatest areas of knowledge are in mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering. I quickly learn to love Gran. When she has reason to be, she is driven. On January 3, instead of starting school, we will have meetings with the Heads of the Departments at my new high school as well as the principal and school district. On January 4, we are going to meet with the Dean, Dean of Admissions and the Head of the Engineering Department at UVic.

I am not ready for the meeting with the university. I have a lot of work to do to prepare. Every minute I am not with Rachel, setting up our business, I am writing a paper for the university. It is the busiest I have ever been during a Christmas Break. The good thing is it takes my mind off Grace and Shelly.

Tuesday, January 3, my life starts to change for the better. That is when school starts up again. First thing in the morning, we have a meeting with the Principal of the school, and some department heads. All they know is that the school district demanded it. Gran had pulled some strings to get the meetings.

To begin the meeting, Gran doesn’t take the best approach. Without any proof, she goes on to tell them that I am too smart to be in regular classes. The problem is almost every parent and grandparent believes their kid is much better than they are. The school staff starts to think this entire meeting is a farce. The Principal has seen my transcripts from Fort Grand, and they are not impressive. I typically got Bs and Cs because of politics.

I do the smart thing and stay silent for the first part of the meeting. When Gran starts to get frustrated, I stand up to get everybody’s attention.

“It is obvious that you don’t believe Gran, and that is understandable. I wouldn’t believe some random lady coming in claiming their charge was superior to everybody else either. What you need is proof.”

The Principal says, “We can agree to test you, and get you situated in the next grade, but that hardly warranted wasting our time.”

I counter, “Humour me for a minute, and you will see why testing for the next grade is a waste of everybody’s time.” Thankfully, there is a chalkboard in their conference room. I head to the chalkboard and start drawing.

In my late 20s to early 40s of my first life, I was in the navy as a marine engineer. The tests we had to take for each level of engineering ticket were a bit extreme. With the lowest level ticket, you had schematics for 40 different ship systems. You were forced to stand in front of a board of senior engineers. They would pick one schematic at random, and you had to draw the entire thing from memory. When you were done drawing it, you had to explain the system so a 5-year-old kid could understand it, even with all the technical data. When that was done, they would fire questions at you about the drawing until you end up admitting you don’t know something. That is question 1 of a 10-question test. In my first test, they kept asking me questions about my schematic until I was giving them answers that were four engineering levels higher than the test required.

As I am drawing, I am talking.

“I figure a demonstration of my mathematical and scientific knowledge, including how the knowledge is applied in the real world, should help you to understand where I am at. For a topic, I figure I would do something pertaining to the local industry. I figure Yarrows shipyard has been in the news a lot lately, so we will talk about something they would build. Gran can tell you I grew up in the northeast corner of the province, nowhere near the ocean. Grandpa and my Uncle work for Yarrows, but I haven’t a clue what they do. In fact, I hardly know my family here, so they didn’t expose me to any of this.”

They won’t believe me if I tell them that I am a time-travelling marine engineer, so I make it sound as if it is all new to me. What I am drawing on the board is three different hull shapes. I start explaining how modern ice breakers don’t use their hull to smash the ice. Using the drawings of the different hulls, I describe which hull best suits the job. I explain how using the right shaped hull produces a wave in front of the ship, and the wave breaks the ice by bending it. The bigger the wave, the thicker the ice that can be broken. That explains the unique science of it.

I then start doing the math. I explain what a derivative and anti-derivative are, then explain how I use them to come up with the equations to figure out the speed and displacement a ship needs to break ice of different thicknesses. All of this is 2nd-year university math. The English teacher is the only one I have lost in the explanation.

When I am done, I do one last quick explanation of how extremely thick ice isn’t broken this way because it requires an insanely large ship.

“If you want to break thick ice, there are special ships built that drive through it in reverse and use the propellers to chop up the ice, but that is extremely slow ... You can see now why testing for the next grade is a bit useless. I should be doing university courses, not grade 9 or 10.”

The school staff is a bit stunned by my presentation. It was long enough in my presentation that some of them came out of their shock and started asking questions about ice breakers. I answer a couple but notice the time, and know many of them need to get to their next classes soon. I cut the questions short.

“I’m sorry, but we are running out of time. Why don’t Gran and I step out for a bit so you can talk in private? We will come back in a half-hour to talk with the Principal, and whoever else is here for the next block.”

As Gran and I wander the halls, she explains to me, “I don’t care how smart you are. You still need to develop socially. I’m not letting you forget High School. You already have enough disadvantages in your life. We are not going to make things worse.”

If I were a 14-year-old kid, she would have a point. I’m OK with a compromise. I could do with taking grades 9-12 English again. When I did finally get involved in sports as a teen, I loved it. It will be nice to get back into a few sports.

Gran doesn’t have much fun when the classes change, and all the kids swarm into the hallways. She isn’t used to such crowds and to be stuck in one filled with what she would term as ‘disrespectful little people’ makes her a bit on edge.

We make our way back to the conference room, and the Principal is waiting in the hall for us. He invites us into the room, and we take our seats. This time, there is only the Principal and one other person. The Principal, Mr. Hardy, introduces him as Dr. Phillips, the Head of the Social Studies Department.

Phillips starts by saying, “Mr. Hardy was telling me how you impressed the head of the math and science departments. You also put on quite a show of public speaking for the English department. I’m curious to know if you neglected social studies.”

“Well, a big part of social studies is history. The younger grades do a lot on Europe and where we came from. Grades 9 and 10 start in on the world wars. Let’s talk about one of the forgotten leaders of World War 2, Karl Doenitz, the man who surrendered Germany.”

I did a quick spiel about how and why he surrendered only the west at first, prolonging the war for a few months before surrendering the east. Stalin’s address to the troops to start the final push to Berlin was broadcast nationally and rebroadcast in Germany. In it, Stalin warns his soldiers not to look upon a German child as a child, but as a fascist. He doesn’t go right out and command his troops to rape and torture children and babies, but he implied it would be a good idea. If Doenitz had surrendered all of Germany, then the entire nation would have revolted. Every man, woman and child would have taken up arms and refused to surrender. The war would never have ended, even if a nuke was dropped on Berlin. He surrendered the west, and the German people migrated there to safety. Once as many people as were willing and able got out of the east, he ordered the complete surrender of Germany.

I talked about how Doenitz was loved by his men. When he had his first meeting with Himmler, and everybody knew Himmler was going to assassinate him. Doenitz’s subordinates refused to let him go. He had no choice but to go, and when he explained it to his men, they decided he could go, but not alone. They formed a human shield around him. The only way Himmler could kill Doenitz was first to kill the majority of the heroes of the Kriegsmarine.

It took me a good 20 minutes to give a condensed history of Doenitz, starting after Hitler’s death. It was more than enough to impress Dr. Phillips.